The Debian Project consists of volunteers, and we are generally
looking for new developers who have some technical knowledge, an
interest in free software, and some free time. You too can help
Debian, just see the page linked above.

Debian runs on many kinds of computers (Intel-compatible was
just the first kind), and maintainers of our
‘ports’ have
some useful web pages. Take a look, maybe you'll want to get
another weirdly named piece of metal for yourself.

Packaging

This manual describes the policy requirements for the Debian
distribution. This includes the structure and contents of the Debian
archive, several design issues of the operating system, as well as
technical requirements that each package must satisfy to be included in
the distribution.

In short, you need to read it.

There are several documents related to the Policy that you might be
interested in, such as:

Filesystem Hierarchy Standard (FHS)
The FHS is a list of directories (or files) where things have
to be put, and compatibility with it is required by Policy
3.x.

List of build-essential packagesThe build-essential packages are packages you are expected to
have before you try to build any package, or a set of packages
that you don't have to include in your package's
Build-Depends line.

Menu systemPrograms that have an interface that need not be passed any
special command line arguments for normal operation should
have a menu entry registered.
Check the menu
system documentation, too.

Emacs policyThe packages related to Emacs are expected to abide by their
own sub-policy document.

Java policyThe proposed equivalent for the above, for Java-related
packages.

This document describes building of a Debian package in common
language, and is well covered with working examples. If you are a
wannabe developer (packager), you will most definitely want to read
this.

Work in progress

This is a list of bugs which may cause a package to be removed
from the "testing" distribution, or in some cases even cause a delay
in releasing the distribution. Bug reports with a severity higher
than or equal to ‘serious’ qualify for the list -- be sure to fix
any such bugs against your packages as soon as you can.

The Debian Bug Tracking System (BTS) itself, for reporting,
discussing, and fixing bugs. Reports of problems in almost any part
of Debian are welcome here. The BTS is useful for both users and
developers.

For developers that wish to keep up-to-date with other packages, the
package tracking system allows them to subscribe (through email) to a
service that will send them copies of BTS mails and notifications
for uploads and installations concerning the packages subscribed to.

Work-Needing and Prospective Packages, WNPP for short, is a list
of Debian packages in need of new maintainers, and also the packages
that have yet to be included in Debian. Check it out if you want to
create, adopt or orphan packages.

New packages are uploaded into the "Incoming" system on the internal
archive servers. Accepted packages are almost immediately
available via HTTP,
and propagated to mirrors four times
a day.
Note: Due to the nature of Incoming, we do
not recommend mirroring it.

Miscellaneous

Converting PGP keys to GPG:

There is information on this in the
developers' reference. You can get some more useful information
on signing a GPG key with a PGP key from the
/usr/share/doc/debian-keyring/README.gz file in the
debian-keyring package.